I spent years turning my council house into the Sistine Chapel

Robert Burns painted The Birth of Venus on his bathroom wall, Sue Kreitzman filled her house with so much art she had to knock through to her neighbour’s … meet the artists who have turned their homes into masterpieces

‘My wife loves it. She says it’s like living in a mansion’ … Robert Burns.
Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian

‘My kids used to roll their eyes’

Robert Burns, 68, Brighton

I grew up in a town in Zambia called Chingola where the pavements were made of wood and people got about on horseback. Renaissance art was not a big part of my schooling. Afterwards, I worked as a window-dresser and then, when I was 20, did the same job in London. But in the early 1980s, the recession decimated independent shops – and my business. So I became a painter and decorator. As a window-dresser, I was artistic every day. Now I’d lost that outlet and I needed something else.

One day, my wife and I were at a car boot sale in Lewes, East Sussex, and I picked up a book about the Vatican – the kind of tourist guide you would buy while waiting in a queue there. I was blown away by all these beautiful interiors. I knew about the Sistine Chapel and St Peter’s Basilica, but I was astounded to see every room was painted – even the Pope’s bathroom. After that, my wife and children would buy me wonderful books about it for birthdays or Christmas.

As a decorator, I’d be employed by people who wanted all these ghastly Farrow & Ball colours like dead pigeon blue

I began to wonder if I could do something similar. It was 2003 and I was 53. I started with the upstairs landing. I’d never drawn before, apart from sketching a Cornish harbour once in the 1980s, and my first attempts were appalling, so I painted them out. But after a while, I thought I was doing all right. I have now copied paintings like The Sistine Madonna, The Birth of Venus, and Phoebus in his Car, Preceded By Aurora and the Morning Star. I’ve even painted trompe l’oeil frames for murals. As a decorator, I learnt how to marble when it was fashionable, but I’ve never been called on to do it in anyone’s home – except my own!

Inspired by the Pope’s bathroom … Robert Burns’s home. Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian

My wife loves it. She says it’s like living in a mansion, but my kids used to roll their eyes. This is a council house and whenever workers from the council come they really like it. We had a new kitchen put in recently and the fitters were all taking photos. I’m extraordinarily proud of it. As a painter and decorator, I’d be employed by middle-class people who wanted all these ghastly Farrow & Ball colours – dead pigeon blue, say. Afterwards, I’d think: “God, it’s like a mausoleum in here.”

Everyone always tells me I should go to the Vatican, or to Florence. Sadly, we can’t afford it on a state pension. But I’d love to.

‘I have nowhere to cook!’

‘All the dolls in my house are dressed for the afterlife’ … Sue Kreitzman in her kitchen. Photograph: Sophia Evans for the Observer

One day in 2000, I was proofreading my 27th cookbook when I picked up a coloured marker and started to doodle. I had always loved art, but at school I was told I was terrible. Yet that day I drew a mermaid. I looked at the mermaid and she looked at me – and suddenly I wasn’t a food writer any more. I was an artist.

I lost all interest in cooking. My family were gobsmacked and my agent thought I’d lost my mind. But the art spilled out. I was obsessed and still am. Within a year, I had my first exhibition.

Beige makes me feel sick and old and scared

This house is like living inside my head: the art keeps me calm, it keeps depression at bay, it defines my life. Beige frightens me. It makes me feel sick and old and scared. I have a friend who only wears black because she doesn’t want to “clash” with the art she collects. I said to her: “Honey, I am the art and the art is me.” Today, I am wearing a Diane Goldie dress which has Malcah Zeldis paintings on it, a necklace by Anne Sophie Cochevelou, and bracelets by Antonio Bonnici and Dan Vanderhei.

When my neighbours moved to the seaside, I bought their place and knocked the two houses through. Now I have two kitchens, but nowhere to cook – because art takes up all the space! I built a shed in the garden and that filled up too. I also have works by other people, friends or younger artists I mentor. Occasionally, people come in and hate it. Some even get angry. But other artists will come in and burst into tears because they feel moved.

‘This house is like living inside my head’ … Sue Kreitzman. Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian

My work is like tribal or folk art. My mother took us to museums every weekend when I was very young – the National Museum of the American Indian and the Museum of Natural History, which had a huge collection of tribal art. She was a strange woman, often very angry, and would drag us through. It’s hard to describe, but I always felt the art was alive, taking care of me. I would feel warmth and life flowing from the exhibits.

My husband and I were high school sweethearts and have been together for 60 years, but we’re both very work focused. When we aren’t in our apartment in New York, he lives in Cambridge, I live in London, and we meet up at weekends. He is very conservative, a scientist, but his place in Cambridge has a lot of art. It is less cluttered than mine, though.

I don’t believe in the afterlife, but I have a little fantasy about what happens to women … one that informs the work I do. You die and wake up in a waiting room. When the phone rings you are called for an interview. At the interview, you have to decide whether to be a goddess or a superhero, and you are dressed accordingly. I would choose to be a goddess. So all the dolls in my house are dressed for their afterlife – in glitter, wings, colour.

I’ve lived in the UK for more than 30 years. The first time I walked down my street in the East End, I felt like I had come home. I can’t tell you how much I love it. My neighbours all indulge me. When I walk down the road, everyone says hello, from the women in niqabs to the old cockneys. They call me the “colourful lady”.

‘My partner died – this is our baby’

‘Visitors have left hair, teeth and ashes’ … Stephen Wright’s House of Dreams. Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian

Visitors to my house often end up in tears. I open it to the public on certain days and there can be a lot of tissues and hugs. Sometimes people are so moved that they want to leave things belonging to loved ones they too have lost: hair, teeth, ashes. It’s become a sort of shrine.

I call it the House of Dreams and it’s a diary of my life: my childhood, my future, my love, my loss. I used to own a stationery business, but sold it in 1998. I was bored. I knew exactly what I would be doing for the rest of the year. There was no room for spontaneity. I had to move on.

With my partner Donald Jones, a costume designer for West End shows, I started visiting the homes of “outsider artists”. They were making work for themselves and I instantly connected with it. So we decided to turn our home into the House of Dreams. We wanted to make something substantial that would last.

The work started out mostly decorative but, two years into our project, Donald died. The following year, my parents died. I am an only child and they had always been amazingly supportive. At first, I didn’t know if I wanted to continue with the house – it had been our creative baby. For a time, I didn’t even look at what we had done. I just walked through it all, got to my studio, and closed the door.

There are times when I feel trapped

Slowly my feelings changed. I realised I now wanted to create a world I felt safe in, like a womb. So, through loss, the house took a different direction. I started using materials with a story – making sculpture, for instance, out of my parents’ clothes. It was about the smell of them. I would find hairs, little notes, buttons in pockets. In 2006, I met my partner Michael Vaughan, an actor, and he encouraged me to continue.

The writing in the hall is about loss: losing Donald in the hospital, being his carer, washing him down, and all the things you never imagine yourself doing. The art has pushed me upstairs. That’s where the kitchen, lounge and bedroom are now. The walls are white and the floors are stripped – it’s my version of a beach house. I made it that way after Michael and I met because the first time he came to the house, there were 44 rubber dolls looking at him while he ate breakfast and he thought it was a bit much. So the house has changed to show you can have a life and a loving relationship after loss, too.

There are times when I feel trapped by the house and have to run to Michael’s. There are moments, too, when I don’t want to live in London any more. I grew up on a smallholding in Cheshire and I like to feel soil under my nails. People here talk about house prices a lot, as if all that matters is how much you make when you sell. But my house is not for sale and the National Trust will take it over when I die.

The House of Dreams will never be finished and I like that. Perhaps one day I’ll find I’ve painted myself into a corner. I would quite like to. That’s ecstasy, isn’t it?

‘I painted some pink dots and just couldn’t stop’

‘I carried on – and on’ … potter Mary Rose Young at her colourful home in the Forest of Dean. Photograph: Adrian Sherratt for the Guardian

I am not a serious person and this house is supposed to make people smile and relax. I like life to be full of fun – like a party – so I have tried to give the place a generous, glamorous feel, rich and decorated, with a childlike sense of wonder. It should give you the same feeling you had as a child, when you looked into a sweetshop window.

I have lived here in the Forest of Dean for nearly 30 years now. I studied ceramic design at art school, but didn’t know what I wanted to do afterwards. I was a little lazy. I tried a couple of jobs and failed, then I set up a pottery and started working away on my own. I sold my creations from a barrow at weekends. Then, in the late 1980s, I went to the Chelsea Art fair and met someone from Barneys New York, the luxury American chain store. They started selling my pottery.

I wanted the house to reflect my work, to make it another expression of my creativity. Because it’s situated down from the road and is quite dark, using a lot of colour worked well. At first, I tried painting everything white – sort of Mediterranean – but that just looked grey and dull. Then, in the dining room, I did pink dots on an orange background, and it really brought the room to life. So I carried on – and on. I did so much to the walls that it began to seem very dull if you looked up. So I ended up having to do the ceilings, too, painting streams of silk flowers around the lights.

Today, it’s more or less finished, although every now and then I go back and re-do a room. I like putting colours together but you can never be sure if they’ll be nice or too much. It’s a juggling act.

‘My shed is now a Tudor church’

‘It was full of old washing machines’ … Kevin Duffy’s fantasy Tudor village in the Rectory Garden Centre in Wigan. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian

There’s a gravestone in the grounds of our garden engraved with the words: “In remembrance of Ould Boby, the donkey, aged 54 years. The faithful friend of William Stopforth 1877.” William Stopforth, it turned out, was a disabled man who lived in the area and travelled by donkey and cart. When the Wigan Observer did an article about the gravestone, the journalist who came round was so struck by our garden he said it deserved to be famous. These days, we get quite a few school parties.

It all started in the 1970s when we – my wife Pat, my son Carl and I – moved into a little house in Wigan next door to what had been a bowling green. It was overgrown, and the brewery which owned it said I could rent it for a £1 a year. It took us about six years just to clear the site, because it had been used as a tip. It was full of old washing machines and rubble. After seven years, I rang the brewery and asked when I should pay them. But they said the rent was only payable “on demand” and they weren’t demanding it.

‘People gave us mannequins, so we turned one into a parson’ … Kevin Duffy’s fantasy village Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian

I started growing tomatoes, houseplants, perennials, lupins and carnations. Soon we had turned it into a garden centre. But then we started adding little buildings, using only found or donated materials. When we went to places such as Grasmere, Windermere and Bowness in the Lake District, you would see quaint little houses and follies. On Ambleside, there’s a house built on a bridge over a river. When you see places like that, they take you out of yourself, make you feel you’re somewhere else. That was what we were trying to create.

In those days, cobblestones were plentiful. Builders would give them to us free. We built all sorts and never copied anything. We turned a potting shed into a church using flagstones people gave us in exchange for plants. Visitors would bring us mannequins, too. We dressed them up in uniforms – old RAF kit, for instance. In the church, we put one in a black frock and turned him into a parson.

Pat and I sang in clubs, mostly country and western. In those days, you could make a living playing Labour or Conservative clubs, or the British Legion. It didn’t pay a fortune but we made a wage. When we got planning permission to build a miniature bungalow on the site, the three of us moved in. My wife died 21 years ago but I still live in the house with Carl.

We have made a tavern in the garden now, with figures in it. On a summer night after we’ve shut the shop, some of the lads come round and we get some beers in and stroll around. It’s a nice spot, I think, well worth a visit.